This invention relates, in general, to electronic and optical components, and more particularly, to an electronic component for aligning a light transmitting structure.
Light transmitting structures such as optical fibers and waveguides, are used to enhance high speed communications from chip to chip, from board to chip, from board to board, and even from computer to computer. Optical devices such as, for example, vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) can generate optical signals which are transmitted by light transmitting structures. To ensure adequate light transfer efficiency, the coupling of optical devices and light transmitting structures requires precise alignment to one another. Existing structures and methods for accomplishing this precise alignment are expensive, unmanufacturable, or produce unnecessarily large components due to the inefficient usage of available space.
However, the precision alignment is preferably neither costly nor difficult to accomplish. Moreover, with the continuing efforts of device integration to produce smaller and more compact systems, the actual or physical alignment mechanisms of optical devices, waveguides, and optical fibers should be smaller and more compact as well.
Accordingly, a need exists for an electronic component for aligning a light transmitting structure which is simple to use, manufacturable, and is cost efficient.